Saturday, December 09, 2006

6 thoughts about BPM

Well, let's confuse you. Let's position BPM.

1) Organizations do not exists. What does exist are legal units (paper), and groups of people performing work, to achieve their own objectives, and/or working together to achieve a (part of) group objectives

2) Processes do not exist. What does exist is people that perform activities. And sometimes these people perform activities in such a way that a patterns seems to appear. Through interventions these patterns can be more enforced, so that the chance that the pattern reappears, grows. Interventions can use a process (model) as one of the ways to reach this.

3) Procesmodels are not the process. A model is always less than reality (unless it’s a beauty contest model…). So a procesmodel will miss certain aspects of reality. Procesmodels, as used in interventions have therefore limited value, and can also be inappropriate.

4) In many organizations much of the work done, is not recognized as a (shared notion of a) “process”

5) Process-knowledge is often not explicit. It is stored in people’s head, and sometimes in IT systems. The same is true for business rules.

6) Every process effort (modeling it, discussing it, measuring it, trying to influence people to alter their "patterns", introducing/changing technoly) can be called "Business Process Management"

7. BPM is a set of tools for human intervention. To try to make people follow certain patterns, which comply better with the (perceived) organization's or manager's goals and ambitions.Not more, not less.